Architectural/social history
The Travellers Club: A Bicentennial History 1819–2019
John Martin Robinson (Libanus Press, £35)
No one walking down Pall Mall can fail to enjoy the serene simplicity of the façade of The Travellers Club, designed in a palazzo style by the young Charles Barry and built in 1830–32.
The club was founded in 1819, in the heady days of British influence and international co-operation following the Congress of Vienna. In his new book, John Martin Robinson plunges the reader into that extraordinary world of aristocratic politicians and diplomats.
He recounts vividly the foundation of The Travellers, before giving an illuminating assessment of the design and construction of its famous building, as well as an engaging history of the club, the members of which start with figures such as Lord Castlereagh and Lord Palmerston and, in more recent times, have included Harold nicolson, Wilfred Thesiger and Paddy Leigh Fermor.
In 1819, Travellers really meant ‘travellers’. one John Jekyll wrote at the time: ‘A candidate must have travelled five hundred miles from London and by land, or convicts from Botany Bay might have qualified’.
From its first home in Waterloo Place, the club relocated, first to 49 Pall Mall, with neogreek interiors by C. R. Cockerell, before moving, in 1832, to Barry’s purpose-built premises, which one member described after the opening as ‘beautiful in all details... the very perfection of comfort’.
Barry had been chosen from a long list of distinguished architects, not only because of his original and subtle Italianinspired design, but probably partly on account of his adventurous travels—to France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, egypt, Syria, Cyprus, Rhodes, Malta and Sicily.
one patron, John Lewis Wolfe, introduced him to the virtues of Italian Renaissance architecture, which would have a significant influence on The Travellers. Barry’s palazzo design defined the very image of the gentleman’s club as a building type after the long dominance of neogreek. It also made his career.
The interiors remain impressively elegant, as Justin Paget’s fine photographs illustrate.
Key historic colour schemes have been re-created and that of the tripartite library is especially memorable. This room was designed around Cockerell’s gift to the club of a cast of the Phigaleian frieze from his own excavation at Bassae; its original oak graining was reinstated in 1972.
The book covers the club’s life through the two World Wars that so shook the London club world after its late 19th-century heyday.
The Travellers more than weathered those storms and has emerged into the 21st century in great health, with refurbished interiors, a major loan of portraits from the Antrobus family (descendants of a founding member), Sir Christopher ondaatje and Lord Bramall among its senior members and Robin Hanburytenison and Ranulph Fiennes among honorary members. Jeremy Musson